Jargon In The Grapes Of Wrath Analysis

Biological and Environmental Imagery and Jargon in The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the movement of the Joad family and thousands of other tenant farmers westward from Oklahoma, as drought and its resulting economic hardship force them to leave behind their homes. His profound and lifelong interest in biology is reflected in many places in his novel (Guthrie). He uses biological and environmental imagery and jargon in the interchapters to contrast and enhance the value of community that is unique to the human animal seen in the cooperative diction in the narrative chapters.
Steinbeck uses biological and environmental imagery and jargon to detail the importance of topsoil and the impact of drought

To support his ideas, he uses environmental jargon that strengthens his ethos. The imagery is used to create the effect of destruction. The geological jargon of “clods” (small clumps of earth) reveals Steinbeck’s general environmental knowledge (Guthrie). The imagery of winds “whisked under stones” and scattering “clods” illustrates the mess that the wind is creating. The imagery of the wind “[sailing] across fields” shows how widespread the effect is. He creates imagery to illustrate the magnitude of the catastrophe, though small in comparison with the larger event of the dust bowl. The wind is disrupting huge numbers of organisms but the wind does not stop. He sets up this indifference to be diametrically opposed to the developing human conscience in the narrative chapters. In fact, it is against this that the families unite to survive. He demonstrates knowledge of soil depletion later on, as he notes that “the land’s getting poorer. You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it… if they could only rotate the crops they might pump blood back into the land” (Steinbeck 43). He describes the biological process by which a soil is depleted of nutrients by